Talking about Americanish - we in the UK at the present time have the opportunity to get acquainted with true Americanish at first hand courtesy of Stephen Fry. I don't know how familiar Stephen Fry is to Americans generally, but he is very well known over here, and he first came to prominence after he appeared at the Edinburgh Fringe with the Cambridge Footlights troupe before I was even born.
He is a self confessed lover of America and the American people and after seeing the first episode of this latest program, kindly recorded for me by my Mum, - "Stephen Fry in America" - you can really understand why. He said that he was very nearly born in America anyway as his father was offered a job in NJ (obviously New Jersey) but according to Stephen "he was born in NW3 instead" - (postal district code for the Hampstead and Highgate area of North West London). His Dad turned down the job offer at Princeton university, NJ.
Stephen Fry set out to drive himself in a familar (to us) black London taxi across the whole of America, taking in as many of the States as possible. The taxi has been adapted for right hand driving, with the steering wheel changed to the "other side".
I want to watch this program mainly to see ordinary Americans in every day situations, which is the whole point of Stephen's exercise, and for me I want to hear all the different accents and dialects of all the people he meets on his journey.
What impressed on him first and foremost was the vastness of the USA and the much greater distances you have to travel over there before you notice any real change in the landscape or the local culture, and even in the New England area itself he literally travelled very many miles but still found he was in the same State.
He started off with a fisherman on the coast of Maine, then with a group of people at a political meeting in New Hampshire, as you would expect right now - and he was amazed to see how it was all carried out in a relaxed and casual way. He then went up to the windiest place in the world - the summit of Mount Washington - by train, and he talked with the train crew and passengers.
Into Vermont, and Massachussetts where he went to Boston, and found that many of the older people seemed to sound quite English English, with one old guy saying words like "past" and "grant" with the broad A of Southern English English.
He joined a group of deer hunters in upper New York State, who looked as if they didn't know what to make of this strange English guy who was anything but rustic - more metrosexual than anything else.
Next stop was Connecticut then down to the New York City area.
Then on down to Queens, in New York City where, for the first time on the whole trip so far, the accent of the people took on a very different character (apart from those people in Boston).
Up until now I couldn't detect any discernible difference in the accents of all the people he had met in all those many hundreds of miles from the coast of Maine via all the other States down to NYC. But here he met a fantastic group of guys from the Borough of Queens who all belonged to an American Italian society - all these guys spoke pure New York and were about the most friendly and hospitable bunch of blokes you could ever wish to meet up with. Stephen had a whale of a time with these guys who were only too happy to tell him all he wanted to know about their lives in the Big Apple. They even accompanied him in the London taxi and showed him round the sights of NYC.
After he had left these guys he went through New Jersey (he joined a group of gamblers in Atlantic City - not for him, he said - the only real winners are the machines!) then on to Rhode Island, Delaware, Maryland -and then eneded this episode among all the politicos in Washington DC.
Apart from those elderly people in Boston and those great guys in Queens I, as a British viewer, really couldn't tell any difference at all in the overall accents of all the people Stephen met along the whole journey from Maine to Washinton DC. Everybody sounded the same to me!
Stephen himself commented on the vastness of that one single portion of the United States - well, he would do wouldn't he, considering he was in the driving seat all the time. He also said that even driving from one end of New York state alone and down to the other was almost the equivalent of driving practically the whole length of England alone (if not a lot of Scotland for good measure as well.
Here in the UK you only have to travel a few miles (comparatively speaking) before you hear very perceptibly different accents and dialects, as you know.
The first episode was really good viewing, and the people Stephen has met so far were absolutely great and exceedingly friendly. His comments on the difference in attitude between the Americans and the Brits is very enlightening, and doesn't show us Brits in a very good light at all really, as the second link below so graphcally indicates.
He must be the most ardent of Americaphiles (is that the right term without checking?)
http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/p=58
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/video/2008/oct/02/stephen.fry.america
Was all this another ginormous digression? Do I need gavelling big time???? Ok! Ok! - gaveling! ;-) Stephen did all that travelling - traveling.....